If you use Google Forms the chances are that your data will go to a Google Spreadsheet, which you can view at your leisure. Each time someone fills in the form a new record (row) is created in the spreadsheet and the time they did it is added in the timestamp column with the date.

Google defaults to American settings so will generally show US date format (month/day/year).

If you want to make it UK date format (day/month/year) do the following: Open the form, click on File, then Spreadsheet settings… then change ‘United States’ to ‘United Kingdom’ and click the blue Save settings button. The spreadsheet will refresh and the timestamps will now be UK style.

1. File / Spreadsheet settings…

2. Locale – change United States to United Kingdom, click Save settings.

3. What the setting looks like with United Kingdom (I got carried away taking screenshots).

While you can link to a Google form and people can go off and fill it in, it’s quite nice to have it seamlessly appearing within your page using a bit of code that Google provides. Here’s how, for people using WordPress.com websites (it’s possibly the same for WordPress.org self-hosted ones but I’ve never used one so don’t know).

A note on iframes
While it’s true that WordPress.com sites don’t support iframes the iframe code that you’ll collect from your form is automatically converted to a WordPress-approved shortcode the minute you paste it into your blog, it’ll look like this.

1. Find the embed code

1a. ‘Old’ Google Forms

Look for File in the menu

Click on it

Select Embed…

Copy the iframe src text for embedding.

1b. New Google Forms

They’ve hidden it in the Send button (took me a while to realise this cos I thought the send button would annoyingly ‘send’ a blank copy of the form to the email address associated with it, but it doesn’t).

The ‘Send via’ bit has several options, look for the angle brackets for the embed code

Once you click on the angle brackets icon the iframe link will appear for you to copy.

2. Insert the embed code

On WordPress.com you can use either the VISUAL (how the post will end up looking) or the TEXT (underlying html) to add or embed different types of links. For iframes you need to use the TEXT view to add it in, and when you return to the VISUAL there’s a high chance that a small square area will be blocked out which is where your form will appear when your website page is published.

Note that with future editing it’s entirely possible that WordPress.com will automatically convert the iframe code info into a Google shortcode – if you have one of those and want to move it around do this in the VISUAL and not the TEXT editing window.

From experience of using Blogger you would also add the iframe directly into the html editing window too.

As I’m using the free version of WordPress.com you’ll probably see some terrible advert below, sorry about that.